Like a crystal castle for a post-ecopalyptic world, Casa Ecologica de Botellas Plasticas (or La Casa de Botellas) is a dream home that only an extremely creative, environment-friendly mind could conjure up. Constructed from thousands of PET plastic bottles, possibly headed for improper disposal, the home created by the Alfredo Santa Cruz family in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, is “a tool for promoting ecological and social responsibility.” The Santa Cruz’s, “successfully designed their portable structures to be accessible, simple, and creative down to the last detail.” As if the ‘big bottle house’ wasn’t whimsical enough, Alfredo also designed a smaller playhouse out of bottles for his young daughter. See exactly how many plastic bottles it took to build La Casa de Botellas after the jump!

The walls, columns, beds, couches, coffee tables, and even an outdoor garden palapa are all made from discarded drink bottles, yet the structure is strong enough to support a Tetra pack roof and CD jewel case doors and windows. And though no member of the family is a professionally trained architect or designer, they developed “a self-invented casting technology [that] keeps the bottles fused together without obstructing the visual symmetry.” La Casa de Botellas is a great example of what families can do with minimal resources and a whole lot of ingenuity.

Here is a list of what Alfredo used to construct La Casa de Botellas:

1200 PET plastic bottles in its walls 1300 milk and wine Tetra Pack containers in its roof 140 compact disk boxes in its doors and windows 120 PET plastic bottles in the couches 200 PET plastic bottles in the bed

To ask questions about the project, feel free to contact Alfredo at lacasaecologicadebotellas@hotmail.com. To offer support to the Cruz family, who provide free home building courses to people in Latin American countries, you may make a donation through their PayPal account.

+ La Casa de Botellas

via Planet Magazine